Bultmann, Barth, and Vatican II. For instance, Jürgen Werbick dis-
cusses‘the truth of recognition’in twenty pages in his Catholic
fundamental theology of 2000, his point of departure being Honneth’s
interpretation of Hegel. He takes Emanuel Levinas and the‘challenge
of the other’as a paradigm of religious communication, arguing that
God can be regarded as the one who verifies and fulfils the promise that
the philosophical figures of otherness and recognition establish.^266
While Werbick shows great awareness of modern philosophical dis-
cussion, he does not pay attention to the theological sources discussed
in the present study.
There is, however, one genre of theological literature in which
recognition is discussed throughout the twentieth century. The ecu-
menical movement has employed this term consistently since the
1920s, reflecting the concept of recognition extensively, especially in
the 1970s. While this has been documented in previous studies,^267
they have not discussed the broader theological and philosophical
significance of the issue. Somewhat paradoxically, discussions on
ecumenical recognition faded in the 1980s, some time before the
philosophers started to employ the concept. In the following, some
of the most prominent texts of the ecumenical movement are briefly
introduced and compared to the broader intellectual history of reli-
gious recognition.
The early ecumenical conferences occasionally employ the idea of
recognition, emphasizing that people recognize one another. Thus the
Lausanne 1927 Faith and Order conference states that‘we yield to
each other mutual recognition as equal members of the orthodox
Christian Church, because we agree in one and the same confession
of belief’.^268 In a similar vein, the Lausanne 1927 report says that
‘complete unity will require that the Churches be so transformed that
there may be full recognition of one another by members of all
communions’.^269
While the personal dimension is involved, the idea of recognition
employed in the early ecumenical movement resembles the legal and
administrative acts of the secular society. Personal recognition can
easily be extended towards legal entities, such as institutions, states,
(^266) Werbick 2000, 120–41.
(^267) Gauly 1980; Meyer 1998 (orig. 1980); Kelly 1996.
(^268) Lausanne 1927, 17. Cf. Kelly 1996, 43.
(^269) Documents on Christian Unity, 179. Cf. Kelly 1996, 47; Meyer 1998, 127.
The Modern Era 173